MEL Gibson is furious at the New York Times over a story that will
depict him as a pope-hating, conspiracy-minded cultist.
Gibson went on Bill O'Reilly's show in January claiming reporter
Christopher Noxon was doing a "hit piece" on him and
"digging into [his] private life . . . getting into [his] banking
affairs . . . harassing [his] family, including my 85-year-old
father."
It's no wonder Gibson was upset. In a story in this Sunday's Times
Magazine, Noxon writes that Gibson embraces an ultra-traditional
"strain of Catholicism rooted in the dictates of a 16th-century
papal council and nurtured by a splinter group of conspiracy-minded
Catholics, mystics, monarchists and disaffected conservatives."
The traditionalists disdain the Second Vatican Council of 1962-1965, say
Mass in Latin, and fast on Fridays. Women wear hats in church.
Noxon got onto the story because his father lives near the Holy Family
church Gibson financed on 16 acres near Malibu.
Gibson refused to be interviewed, but Noxon located the star's father,
Hutton Gibson, in a Houston suburb. The elder Gibson has
railed against the Vatican for more than 30 years, having written such
books as "Is the Pope Catholic?" and published a quarterly
newsletter, "The War Is Now."
Hutton told Noxon that Vatican II was "a Masonic plot backed by the
Jews," called Pope John Paul II
"Garrulous Karolus, the Koran kisser," and denied that the
Holocaust ever happened. "Go ask an undertaker or the guy who
operates the crematorium what it takes to get rid of a dead body,"
he said. "It takes one liter of petrol and 20 minutes. Now, six
million?"
Mel Gibson has never expressed such views. But the Times article suggests
that "The Passion" - the movie he's directing about the last 12
hours in Christ's life - could revive the medieval charge that it was the
Jews who killed Christ.
Gary Giuffr�, a traditionalist and pal of the Gibson family, says
in the story that the film "will graphically portray the intense
suffering of Christ, perhaps as no film has done before."
Giuffre says the movie, which Gibson is financing with $25 million, will
"lay the blame for the death of Christ where it belongs."
Noxon tells PAGE SIX he never harassed Gibson or his family: "This
story fell into my back yard. Mel has played hardball with me the whole
time, and gone ballistic. I tried to be thoughtful and fair, but all he
knows how to do is whip up the armies."
http://www.nypost.com/seven/03062003/gossip/pagesix.htm
